230 quotes
Struggling toward impassioned choirs,
Crying among the clouds, enraged
By gold antagonists in air —
I know my lazy, leaden twang
Is like the reason in a storm;
And yet it brings the storm to bear.
I twang it out and leave it there.
The Man With the Blue Guitar (1937)
He is and may be but oh! He is, he is,
This foundling of the infected past, so bright,
So moving in the manner of his hand.
Yet look not at his colored eyes. Give him
No names. Dismiss him from your images.
The hot of him is purest in the heart.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Phoebus is dead, ephebe. But Phoebus was
A name for something that never could be named.
There was a project for the sun and is.
There is a project for the sun. The sun
Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be
In the difficulty of what it is to be.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music.
Harmonium (1923)
Like a page of music, like an upper air,
Like a momentary color, in which swans
Were seraphs, were saints, were changing essences.
The west wind was the music, the motion, the force
To which the swans curveted, a will to change,
A will to make iris frettings on the blank.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
Life consists
Of propositions about life. The human
Revery is a solitude in which
We compose these propositions, torn by dreams,
By the terrible incantations of defeats
And by the fear that the defeats and the dreams are one.
The whole race is a poet that writes down
The eccentric propositions of its fate.
Transport to Summer (1947)
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea
Of this invention, this invented world,
The inconceivable idea of the sun.
You must become an ignorant man again
And see the sun again with an ignorant eye
And see it clearly in the idea of it.
Never suppose an inventing mind as source
Of this idea nor for that mind compose
A voluminous master folded in his fire.
Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (1942)
I like my philosophy smothered in beauty and not the opposite.
Attributed
Success as a result of industry is a peasant ideal.
Attributed
Poetry is an effort of a dissatisfied man to find satisfaction through words.
Attributed